A recently discovered supernova has left astronomers scratching their heads. It's in the wrong cosmic neighborhood, and from the vantage point of conventiona...

Sepp Hasslberger's insight:

Mainstream cosmology doesn't have a handle on the forces that power stars and planets, or on their structure. The "nuclear furnace" hypotesis for stars is deeply flawed, and so is the "molten iron core" model for planets.

Researchers at The Ohio State University have discovered how to control heat with a magnetic field.

The study is the first ever to prove that acoustic phonons - the elemental particles that transmit both heat and sound - have magnetic properties.

"This adds a new dimension to our understanding of acoustic waves," said Joseph Heremans, Ohio Eminent Scholar in Nanotechnology and professor of mechanical engineering at Ohio State. "We've shown that we can steer heat magnetically. With a strong enough magnetic field, we should be able to steer sound waves, too."

Sepp Hasslberger's insight:

So heat, sound and magnetic fields have been shown to influence each other. This adds to another recent post about students experimentally putting out fires with sound waves...

Astrophysicist Adam Frank's new book mixes cosmology with humanity. How does our understanding of the universe and cosmic time inform our daily lives? Especially if time is an illusion?

Julian Barbour's solution to the problem of time in physics and cosmology is as simply stated as it is radical: there is no such thing as time.

"If you try to get your hands on time, it's always slipping through your fingers," says Barbour. "People are sure time is there, but they can't get hold of it. My feeling is that they can't get hold of it because it isn't there at all."

Barbour speaks with a disarming English charm that belies an iron resolve and confidence in his science. His extreme perspective comes from years of looking into the heart of both classical and quantum physics.

Isaac Newton thought of time as a river flowing at the same rate everywhere. Einstein changed this picture by unifying space and time into a single 4-D entity. But even Einstein failed to challenge the concept of time as a measure of change.

In Barbour's view, the question must be turned on its head. It is change that provides the illusion of time. Channeling the ghost of Parmenides, Barbour sees each individual moment as a whole, complete and existing in its own right.

He calls these moments "Nows."

Sepp Hasslberger's insight:

Neither time nor space have independent physical existence. They are both a consequence of motion...

A comprehensive study of historical facts, current research, and various practical applications for both technology and the natural world.

The Austrian forester Viktor Schauberger (1885 - 1958) is today considered to be one of the pioneers of modern water research and holistic nature observation. Already during the first half of the 20th century, he warned insistently against the consequences of unrestricted exploitation of the environment.

As an alternative, he propagated a radical rethinking of our attitudes towards nature, and the development of completely new methods of energy production that are in harmony with nature. He formulated his so-called "C & C" Principle: to Comprehend and Copy Nature!

The applications of his ideas and his inventions include devices for qualitative water refinement (the creation of "living water"), spiral water pipes that reduce friction, river regulation in accordance with natural water flow, and the generation of energy from air and water using nature's own principles of motion based on suction and inward spiral movement -- the "Implosion" Principle.

He was a genius who advocated to base technology on the life principle (vortex flow forms) rather than staying on the radiative, explosive track which is characteristic for the current industrial model.

Dwarf planet Ceres continues to puzzle scientists as NASA's Dawn spacecraft gets closer to being captured into orbit around the object. The latest images from Dawn, taken nearly 29,000 miles (46,000 kilometers) from Ceres, reveal that a bright spot that stands out in previous images lies close to yet another bright area.

"Ceres' bright spot can now be seen to have a companion of lesser brightness, but apparently in the same basin. This may be pointing to a volcano-like origin of the spots, but we will have to wait for better resolution before we can make such geologic interpretations," said Chris Russell, principal investigator for the Dawn mission, based at the University of California, Los Angeles.

Sepp Hasslberger's insight:

Ceres is a mini planet (about 950 km diameter and, it seems, perfectly round. It orbits the sun in the asteroid belt, somewhere between Mars and Jupiter.

It seems strange to find a perfectly round object together with the irregularly shaped asteroids, which are most probably the pieces of a former planet that was destroyed. And to make things even more strange, Ceres has a pair of strong light emitting points, now imaged by Dawn space probe, as it draws closer ...

Stephen Hawking has set the world of physics back on its heels by reversing his lifetime’s work and a pillar of modern physics.

He claims that black holes do not exist – saying that the idea of an event horizon, the invisible boundary thought to shroud every black hole -- the awesome gravitational pull created by the collapse of a star will be so strong that nothing can break free including light -- is flawed.

Hawking proposes that instead of an inescapable event horizon, we should think of an “apparent horizon”. “The absence of event horizons means that there are no black holes — in the sense of regimes from which light can't escape to infinity.”

“There is no escape from a black hole in classical theory. [But quantum theory] enables energy and information to escape from a black hole," Hawking told Nature. His revised theory allows matter and energy to be held for a period of time before being released back into space.

Hawking says that his revsion requires a new theory that merges gravity with the other fundamental forces of nature. “The correct treatment remains a mystery,” he observed.

Scientists in the U.K. have examined a tiny metal circular object, and are suggesting it might be a micro-organism deliberately sent by extraterrestrials to create life on Earth.

Don't be fooled by the size of the object in the microscopic image above. It may appear to look like a planet-sized globe, but in fact, it's no bigger than the width of a human hair.

The University of Buckingham reports that the minuscule metal globe was discovered by astrobiologist Milton Wainwright and a team of researchers who examined dust and minute matter gathered by a high-flying balloon in Earth's stratosphere.

"It is a ball about the width of a human hair, which has filamentous life on the outside and a gooey biological material oozing from its centre," Wainwright said...

Sepp Hasslberger's insight:

Panspermia, the theory that biological life may be intentionally "seeded" so as to start life on recently formed planets, just got a boost. A tiny metal sphere as a carrier...

I'm still undecided whether ideas like these are interesting, realistic, amazing or terrifying. Growing up on a property I had a lot of time out in the bush to think about things, and let me tell you, at night when the milky way turns the sky white above you, lighting your surroundings almost as well as the sun, it's almost impossible to not think about the origin of life on earth. I am always hoping and dreading to hear evidence based arguments that there is other life out there, but eventually one day (whether tomorrow, next year, in five years, or 100) we will discover something extraordinary. For now I'll just have to keep reading and wondering :)

The sun sustains life on Earth, and maybe that's not all it does. Provocative new research by scientists in Norway suggests there may be a link between solar activity at the time of your birth and how long you're likely to live.

Specifically, the scientists found that the life spans of people born during a so-called "solar maximum" period - when the sun displays the greatest number of sunspots and solar flares in any given solar cycle - are about five years shorter than those of people born in a solar minimum period, when the sun is less active.

Sepp Hasslberger's insight:

So it appears solar activity at time of birth may determine our likely lifespan.

Living on the outside surface of a planet has its drawbacks, radiation damage being one of them...

The first year of science operations with the Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) has produced stunning exoplanet images, spectra and research.

The Gemini Planet Imager (GPI) is designed for direct imaging and analysis of faint planets lying close to bright stars and to probe their atmospheres, plus study dusty, planet-forming disks around young stars. It is the most advanced such instrument to be deployed on the 8-metre Gemini South telescope, at Cerro Pachon in Chile.

“GPI’s advanced imaging capabilities have delivered exquisite images and data,” said Perrin. “These improved views are helping us piece together what’s going on around these stars, yet also posing many new questions.”

Research papers published by the journal Nature will be made free to view online in an effort to make it easier for scientists to share their work with their peers and the public.

Publishing company, Macmillan has announced that it’s making 48 of its journals free to access, including Nature Genetics, Nature Medicine and Nature Physics.

Citing on-going library and individual subscriptions as their primary source of income, the publishers are now planning on using an iTunes-like online repository called ReadCube to host and display read-only, PDF versions of the journal articles.

“We know researchers are already sharing content, often in hidden corners of the Internet or using clumsy, time-consuming practices,” said Timo Hannay, the managing director of a division of Macmillan called Digital Science.

Sepp Hasslberger's insight:

Not completely free and open, but certainly a step in the right direction, probably due to pressure from the fact that people are already sharing ...

Superclusters – regions of space that are densely packed with galaxies – are the biggest structures in the Universe. But scientists have struggled to define exactly where one supercluster ends and another begins.

Now, a team based in Hawaii has come up with a new technique that maps the Universe according to the flow of galaxies across space.

Redrawing the boundaries of the cosmic map, they redefine our home supercluster and name it Laniakea, which means ‘immeasurable heaven’ in Hawaiian.

Sepp Hasslberger's insight:

Galaxies and clusters of galaxies ... exploring the far reaches of the universe.

The book, Cells, Gels and the Engines of Life builds on the central role of water for biology. It provides evidence that much of the water in the cell is very near to one or another hydrophilic surface and therefore ordered, and that cell behavior can be properly understood only if this feature is properly taken into account.

It goes on to show that seemingly complex behaviors of the cell can be understood in simple terms once a proper understanding of water and surfaces is achieved.

While the book is an award-winning best seller, it has aroused controversy because it questions some long-held basic features of cell function such as membrane channels and pumps. This steps on many scientific toes.

Many others have praised the insights obtained from building on a foundation of first principles (see book website above). One prominent reviewer from Harvard University opines that the book is “a 305 page preface to the future of cell biology.”

Sepp Hasslberger's insight:

Water is so important yet so little researched ... but here is some progress and it promises to revolutionise our understanding of biological processes.

The solar system’s largest moon, Ganymede, in orbit around Jupiter, harbors an underground ocean containing more water than all the oceans on Earth. Scientists were already fairly confident in the ocean’s existence, based on the moon’s smooth icy surface—evidence of past resurfacing by the ocean—and other observations by the Galileo spacecraft, which made a handful of flybys in the 1990s. But new observations by the Hubble Space Telescope, published online today in the Journal of Geophysical Research: Space Physics, remove any remaining doubt. Ganymede now joins Jupiter’s Europa and two moons of Saturn, Titan and Enceladus, as moons with subsurface oceans—and good places to look for life.

Ceres, the largest object in the asteroid belt, may also have a subsurface ocean. The new results come from Hubble’s observations of Ganymede’s magnetic field, which produces two auroral belts (pictured) that can be detected in the ultraviolet. Because of interactions with Jupiter’s own magnetic field, these belts rock back and forth. However, there is a third magnetic field in the mix—one emanating from the electrically conductive, saltwater ocean and induced by Jupiter’s field—that counterbalances Jupiter’s field and reduces the rocking of the auroral belts. The Hubble study suggests that the ocean can be no deeper than 330 kilometers below the surface.

Rosetta is a robotic space probe consisting of a comet orbiter and a lander built by the European Space Agency, which also launched it in 2004.

Rosetta reached the comet 67P/Churyumov-Gerasimenko (67P) on August 2014 at 3.7 AU (astronomical unit, equal to 149.6 million kilometres, the mean distance from the centre of the earth to the centre of the sun), and moved from 200 km above the comet to a bound orbit of ~10 km, becoming the first spacecraft to orbit a comet.

On 12 November 2014, the lander module Philae soft-landed on the comet and managed to send some data before its solar-powered battery ran out, and it went into hibernation until its battery becomes sufficiently recharged, which hasn’t yet happened.

Rosetta’ s first results were stunning and ‘surprising’. Images of the comet nucleus (the solid body) inside the coma (the surrounding cloud of dust and gas) show two lobes joined by a ‘neck’. The surfaces are rocky and rugged, and blacker than coal.

Significantly, water vapour (H2O gas) is actively produced. The total H2O gas production rates varied from 1 x 1025 molecules per second in early June 2014 to 4 x 1025 molecules per second in early August 2014 (equivalent to ~0.3 kgs-1 and 1.2 kg s-1 respectively). Water production is associated with jets shooting out from the comet nucleus.

How is this copious amount of water produced?

According to standard theory, water is being outgassed through vents from underground stores, or sublimated from the surface by the warmth of the sun, neither of which appears likely for 67P.

The most actively producing regions and jets are from the neck, the shadiest, coldest part of the comet, and tellingly, not from the most sunlit parts (see Image).

Sepp Hasslberger's insight:

Now that is interesting. We are seeing, for the first time, a comet when it get active in its swing around the sun, and it looks like we will have to revise our theories on how comets work.

They aren't the 'dirty snowballs' they have been described as. They are rocks that, when hit by solar wind, start to actively *produce* water...

On Feb. 16, an international group of researchers proposed new hypotheses about some unusual plumes spotted by amateur astronomers on Mars in 2012.

The plumes were seen rising to altitudes of over 250 km above. By comparison, similar features seen in the past have never exceeded 100 km.

Now, new conclusions presented by scientists still raise more questions about the mysterious plumes, than they answer.

“We tentatively explored two scenarios that might help explain the observed phenomenon: a cloud of condensed CO2 or H2O, or even dust, and an aurora. After elaborating the details of these two hypotheses, we came to the conclusion that none of them provided a fully satisfactory answer,”

Antonio García Muñoz of ESA’s European Space Research and Technology Centre (ESTEC), co-author of the paper reporting the results in the journal Nature, told astrowatch.net.

“Therefore, we consider that the genuine nature of the phenomenon is still an open issue.”

Sepp Hasslberger's insight:

Is it not interesting that a major discovery about mysterious plumes on Mars had to be made by amateurs, not by the agency that should be telling us about such things?

The phenomenon was visible to the earth-bound telescopes of amateur astronomers, several of them then somehow got past the publication filters that normally suppress any reporting on what we can't explain.

Even more interesting (to me) than the clouds that can be seen in these images, is the light that comes from a south polar opening on planet Mars.

Oh yes, that's supposed to be ice according to official interpretations.

An incredible discovery that was recently made in Russia threatens to shatter conventional theories about the history of the planet.

On Mount Shoria in southern Siberia, researchers have found an absolutely massive wall of granite stones. Some of these gigantic granite stones are estimated to weigh more than 3,000 tons, and many of them were cut “with flat surfaces, right angles, and sharp corners”.

Nothing of this magnitude has ever been discovered before. The largest stone found at the megalithic ruins at Baalbek, Lebanon is less than 1,500 tons. So how in the world did someone cut 3,000 ton granite stones with extreme precision, transport them up the side of a mountain and stack them 40 meters high?

According to the commonly accepted version of history, it would be impossible for ancient humans with very limited technology to accomplish such a thing.

Could it be possible that there is much more to the history of this planet than we are being taught?

Sepp Hasslberger's insight:

More and more evidence points to the fact that human civilizations have a much richer history than the historians are letting on ...

The yellow shape in this figure is the heliopause, the boundary between the heliosphere and the local interstellar medium. The sun sits at the center of this large bubble, but is too small to be seen here. The gray lines are the solar magnetic field lines and the red lines are the interstellar magnetic field.

The sun's magnetic field has more influence on the shape of the heliopause than previously thought.

An examination of the age of structures across the earth reveals conclusively that they were built by advanced civilizations from over 29,000 years ago.

Houston anthropologist, Dr. Semir Osmanagich, founder of the Bosnian Archaeology Park, the most active archaeology site in the world, declares that irrefutable scientific evidence exists of ancient civilizations with advanced technology that leaves us no choice but to change our recorded history.

Sepp Hasslberger's insight:

There definitely were developed human civilisations before this current one. Evidence of construction is emerging all over the place, that does not fit with our account of human history.

A dark hole hundreds of times bigger than the Earth has been spotted on the surface of the sun. A photo of the enormous "coronal hole" (below) was snapped by a camera aboard NASA's

Solar Dynamics Observatory on Jan. 1, 2015.

The irregularly shaped hole spans about 400,000 kilometers (250,000 miles) at its widest point, said Dr. C. Alex Young, associate director for science for the heliophysics division at the space agency's Goddard facility in Greenbelt, Maryland. Its total surface area is about 410 times that of the Earth, he said (see below for size comparison).

Coronal holes were first seen in photos taken by NASA astronauts in the 1970s. They aren't holes in the usual sense. Rather, they're colder, cooler regions where the sun's magnetic field reaches out into space. The holes can remain visible for five years or longer.

Sepp Hasslberger's insight:

We don't know the significance of this one yet ... or the consequences, if there are any.

The P2P aerospace revolution will incorporate hundreds of thousands of citizens into space exploration and will go far beyond what any state has been able to do so far. The first human settlers of new planets will be makers.

3D printers have reached space. The first, installed in the International Space Station, just printed its first object. The astronaut excitedly said, “It’s a big milestone, not only for NASA and Made In Space, but for humanity as a whole.” Both Neal Armstrong and “Butch” Wilmore are leaders of this unique moment, from which there is no turning back. They blazed a trail, which was as uncertain as all trails are that lead to better futures.

Sepp Hasslberger's insight:

3D printers in space - we're slowly but surely inching closer to Star Trek's replicators that can make anything from drinks and hot meals to spare parts ...

I've seen countless science fiction movies and documentaries about the future of humanity. Nothing I've ever seen is as inspiring and beautiful and realistic as this extraordinary short film by Erik Wernquist, narrated by Carl Sagan. Watch it and get ready for goosebumps.

Sepp Hasslberger's insight:

Is there a future for humanity out there in deep space?

If you believe there is, here's an inspiring short video with great shots and graphics, narrated by Carl Sagan...

Austrian born Wilhelm Reich, M.D. (1897-1957) was a brilliant psychoanalytic student of Sigmund Freud and a neuro-psychiatric student of Nobel laureate Julius Wagner-Jauregg.

Reich's wide-ranging social, medical and scientific work included promoting sexual health, standardizing and advancing therapeutic techniques, analyzing the psychology of fascism as manifested in both Nazism and Communism, conducting cellular research, investigating the origin of cancer and other diseases, developing experimental treatments for terminal cancer patients, and carrying out innovative climate research.

Tragically his books and published research journals were banned and burned by the United States government in 1956 and 1960, and Reich died in a Federal penitentiary in 1957.

For decades Reich’s ideas and work have been carelessly and dishonestly misrepresented in the academic, medical and scientific communities, as well as in the media and on the Internet—including Wikipedia—by those whose knowledge of Reich is not based on accurate information.

Finally, a factually accurate, full-length documentary film about Reich has been meticulously researched and written, and a serious effort is now underway to fund this film.

Sepp Hasslberger's insight:

It wouldn't be bad perhaps, to have some accurate information on what happened in those days and why Reich's scientific research was considered so dangerous that it had to be suppressed even going to the length of burning all his books and research papers, quite apart from Reich's death in prison.

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